Cutting Berries

by Pat Anthony


I open her
voice admonishing smell
every one—there’s so many bad
ones—smell, then taste. She was terrified

of food unless it was field greens, wizened
apples, the occasional rosined peach.
Melons were threatening with mint
green interiors glistening like a lie beneath

beguiling names like honeydew.
Plums were not to be stolen
from iambic refrigerators, and none
could be trusted beyond prune, no
damson or green gage, no black gold.
 
My father brought gooseberries once
and she tried to hide them in a pie,
buried them in sugar so thick it turned
to brittle glass encasing each green globe
all sourness preserved much like the

cake she made one day without baking
soda, somehow become almost sky
blue and making us eat it until we
broke pieces off and took them

to the chickens where they became
rocks petrified like the bunch of us
never having enough but not knowing
what to do with what we had.